Potential impacts of climate and landscape fragmentation changes on plant distributions: Coupling multi-temporal satellite imagery with GIS-based cellular automata model

Climate change and landscape fragmentation are considered to be the main treats to biodiversity. In this study, probable alteration of future species distribution was tested based on the association of landscape fragmentation and climate change scenarios compared to the classical approach that assumed an unchanged landscape. Also, projected range shifts including realistic dispersal scenarios were compared with classical models, in which no or full dispersal has been supposed.A GIS-based cellular automata model, MigClim, was implemented to projection of future distribution over the 21st century for three plant species in a study area of the central Germany. For each species, simulations were run for four dispersal scenarios (full dispersal, no dispersal, realistic dispersal, and realistic dispersal with long-distance dispersal events), two landscape fragmentation (static and dynamic change) and two climate change (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5) scenarios. In this research, temporal satellite data were utilized to simulate landscape changes by the use of a hybrid (CA-Markov) model for the years 2020, 2040, 2060 and 2080.A significant difference appears to be between the simulations of realistic dispersal limitations and those considering full or no dispersal for projected future distributions. Although simulations accounting for dispersal limitations produced, for our study area, results that were closer to no dispersal than to full dispersal. Additionally, our results revealed that change in landscape fragmentation is more effective than the climate change impacts on species distributions in this study.